[BostonCard]

Every third story linked on Weather Channel website front page is titled:  YOU WON'T BELIEVE (fill in rest of headline or picture  here).  It's a meme.  YOU WON'T BELIEVE what they found in this cave.  YOU WON'T BELIEVE what made THIS (photo)  YOU WON'T BELIEVE what came up in this fishing net! (photo)...  and now Yvonne is plagiarizing.  Lawyers to follow.

It has become a pet peeve of mine.  It's like every single item on my Facebook feed is someone posting about some unbelievable item.  It bothers me because people are employing psychologists to manipulate people into clicking on articles (same with so-called freemium games, where the goal is to separate people from real money to gain virtual goods).

http://blog.hootsuite.com/the-strange-sc...lick-bait/

The secret, Eric Jaffe writes in Fast Company, is “engineering ‘curiosity gap’ headlines.” He cites George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon as the leading proponent of the “information gap” theory of curiosity. In the mid-1990s, Loewenstein wrote that “the curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.” If you feel like click bait is a little like content junk food, you’re on to something. Jaffe explains that, just as fast food chains have figured out just the right compound of chemistry and marketing to provoke hunger for products we know we don’t need, some headline writers have figured out exactly what makes us feel like we need the information on the other side of a link.

BC

[BostonCard]

Every third story linked on Weather Channel website front page is titled:  YOU WON'T BELIEVE (fill in rest of headline or picture  here).  It's a meme.  YOU WON'T BELIEVE what they found in this cave.  YOU WON'T BELIEVE what made THIS (photo)  YOU WON'T BELIEVE what came up in this fishing net! (photo)...  and now Yvonne is plagiarizing.  Lawyers to follow.

It has become a pet peeve of mine.  It's like every single item on my Facebook feed is someone posting about some unbelievable item.  It bothers me because people are employing psychologists to manipulate people into clicking on articles (same with so-called freemium games, where the goal is to separate people from real money to gain virtual goods).

http://blog.hootsuite.com/the-strange-sc...lick-bait/

The secret, Eric Jaffe writes in Fast Company, is “engineering ‘curiosity gap’ headlines.” He cites George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon as the leading proponent of the “information gap” theory of curiosity. In the mid-1990s, Loewenstein wrote that “the curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.” If you feel like click bait is a little like content junk food, you’re on to something. Jaffe explains that, just as fast food chains have figured out just the right compound of chemistry and marketing to provoke hunger for products we know we don’t need, some headline writers have figured out exactly what makes us feel like we need the information on the other side of a link.

BC